Welcome to the Department of Linguistics.

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, from the sounds and gestures of speech up to the organization of words, sentences, and meaning. Linguistics is also concerned with the relationship between language and cognition, society, and history.

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania is the oldest modern linguistics department in the United States, founded by Zellig Harris in 1947. The department is known for its interdisciplinary research, spanning many subfields of linguistics, as well as integration of theory, corpus research, field work, and cognitive and computer science.

In Voice and v, Julie Anne Legate investigates the syntactic structure of voice, using Acehnese as the empirical starting point. A central claim is that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP. Legate further claims that VoiceP may be associated with phi-features that semantically restrict the external argument position but do not saturate it. Through minor variations in the properties of VoiceP, Legate explains a wide range of non-canonical voice constructions, including: agent-agreeing passives, grammatical object passives, impersonals, object voice constructions, and applicative voice in causatives. Her analysis draws on data from a typologically diverse set of languages, not only Malayo-Polynesian, but also Celtic, Scandinavian, and Slavic.

Voice and v provides a detailed investigation into the syntactic structure of an understudied Malayo-Polynesian language, and thereby reveals important insights for the theoretical analysis of voice and the verb phrase. Moreover, the work applies and broadens these insights to a range of related passive-like constructions crosslinguistically. Voice and v thus joins a handful of model volumes that enlist typological depth and breadth to further our development of modern linguistic theory.

This book is the first since 1897 to describe the earliest
reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English. It outlines the
grammar of Proto-Indo-European, considers the changes by which one
dialect of that prehistoric language developed into Proto-Germanic, and
provides a detailed account of the grammar of Proto-Germanic. The next
volume will consider the development of Proto-Germanic into Old English.

All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold.

Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.

This book examines the diversity among American dialects and presents
the counterintuitive finding that geographically localized
dialects of North American English are increasingly diverging from one
another over time. Labov describes the political forces
that drive these ongoing changes, as well as the political consequences
in public debate. The author also considers the recent
geographical reversal of political parties in the Blue States and the
Red States and the parallels between dialect differences
and the results of recent presidential elections. Finally, in attempting
to account for the history and geography of linguistic
change among whites, Labov highlights fascinating correlations between
patterns of linguistic divergence and the politics of
race and slavery, going back to the antebellum United States.
Complemented by an online collection of audio files that illustrate
key dialectical nuances, Dialect Diversity in America offers an unparalleled sociolinguistic study from a preeminent
scholar in the field.

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Drawing on cutting-edge developments in biology, neurology, psychology,
and linguistics, Charles Yang's The Infinite Gift takes us inside the
astonishingly complex but largely subconscious process by which children
learn to talk and to understand the spoken word. Yang also puts forth
an exciting new theory that we learn our native languages in part by
unlearning the grammars of all the rest.